Annual Tyranny

Every year, just as we are plagued by seasonal disease like dengue, encephalitis or bird/swine flu, there is the increasing menace of kanwarias every rainy season. Of course, this is restricted to the ‘hallowed’ cow-belt of North India.

This ritual of collecting water from the Ganges and anointing a शिवलिंग  used to be a personal article of faith – a paying of obeisance to the memory of one’s forefathers (strangely the ‘foremothers’ were ignored). It used to be simple affair even in the nineties – the equipment consisted of a simple bamboo stick, suspended from which on either end were two small pots of water from the Ganges. These have now evolved into weird elaborate structures that resemble the ताज़िआ  of Shias during मुहर्रम।

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Those devout persons of yore could be seen in isolation trudging quietly along the roads without any fuss and not interfering with the local populace.

The devout have been replaced by louts.

The whole process has now been institutionalized. Marauding gangs of saffron clad goons shout, yell and dance on the highways brandishing hockey-sticks or dandas obstructing traffic and threatening everyone who has the temerity to just carry on his or her business. They are a law unto themselves governed by a mob mentality with destructive propensities.

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Locals along the kanwaria route, armed with a misplaced sense of piety, bend over backwards to accommodate these ‘holy warriors’ by setting up camps and, in the process, encroaching on public space and roads. From these लंगर emanates an effluvium of rotting food, sweaty bodies infested with fungal infections, urine and excreta. Besides this mephitic miasma assaulting the olfactory senses, there is the additional auditory insult of loudspeakers belting out ear-splitting raucous parodies of Bollywood songs parading as भजन. Night and day this vulgar assault continues disrupting the lives of everyone.

Just as internet speeds are increasing, this kanwaria business has now been abridged to a gimmick called the dak kanwar. This religion at broadband speeds consists of a relay of runners accompanied by a township on wheels. The whole noisy and chaotic affair mercifully ends relatively quickly.

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 Whether Modi succeeds in setting up dedicated frrieght corridors, dedicated kanwaria corridors have come to stay.